Another Horridon help thread

I'm sure you're all sick of people asking this, but my raid group has been bashing our heads against Horridon since late March and we literally have not seen the fourth door yet.

Unfortunately, I had some pc problems recently and didn't end up logging most of our runs, but I do have logs from our most recent raid night to look at. I've never posted here on mmo-champ before, so I can't post a link, but we're Earendil Riders on US-Moonrunner and the six attempts from that night are (I believe) the only report currently up there.

In terms of strategy--we don't do anything crazy. We tried three-healing on our first two attempts that night, then switched to two-healing when that wasn't working too well for us. Tank swaps after each door, and we would say to always kill the second major add (always doing the one that spawns on the left, so there's no confusion about which to kill first) before swapping to the dinomancer, even if the second add is still fairly healthy. I realize this isn't ideal, since it gives the dinomancer time to heal Horridon and lets the little adds build up, but to be honest I'm more interested in getting to the Horridon phase than I am in getting to it with him sufficiently damaged. When the sand traps/living poisons/frost orbs start to reach dangerous levels, we start moving the raid towards the next door to keep people from tunnel visioning their way to death.

In terms of issues I'm already aware of--first of all, I realize my healing is pretty suboptimal--in particular, I was appalled at how low my lifebloom uptime is, and I sometimes fail to use my cooldowns as often as I should (Ironbark in particular, I forget it extremely often). Also, the second and third doors can get pretty hairy when the debuffs stack up, since when we 2-heal our paladin tank and myself are our only two capable of dispelling the diseases, with our moonkin able to help on the poisons as well. Additionally, we haven't been using Heroism consistently, although we're starting to just go ahead and use it on the third door (again, I'd rather save it for Jalak, but if we aren't even getting through the doors there's no reason to go without it).

I'm really interested in any feedback we can get, to be honest. This boss is driving me up a wall. In particular, I feel like our DPS is far below where it should be--everyone in the raid is over 495 item level, most of us are over 500, and yet we struggle to kill the major adds in a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about most DPS classes to read the logs and see what they might be able to change to improve. Any advice for myself, the other healer, or the tanks would be greatly appreciated as well. I am considering the strategy I've seen of just sending a healer and the Horridon tank to stand on the opposite side of the room so there's less to worry about, but (A) I'd prefer not to resort to trying to break the fight, and (B) I'm concerned that one person might struggle to handle all the raid healing by themself, particularly if the various DoTs start to stack up because the adds aren't dying fast enough.

Group composition? Couldn't find your logs- May have been too long since your recent upload and they were wiped. Regardless, based on this description there are a few things to work on. Here are ours from Tonight http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/3...?s=1116&e=1652 if you want to look around and compare. I'm Vora the disc priest.

Also, the second and third doors can get pretty hairy when the debuffs stack up, since when we 2-heal our paladin tank and myself are our only two capable of dispelling the diseases, with our moonkin able to help on the poisons as well.

If you have a holy paladin, use Symb on him so you get Cleanse. On the 2nd door, there is no real reason for more than 1-2 stacks of the poison to go out, although getting 0 is also perfectly manageable.

What we like to do to help with this is that you can see and mark all the adds pre fight. So leave the first "big" add unmarked, and then mark the next two that jump down and have pre-set kill orders. Like after the Unmarked Wastewalker (first door) dies, kill Skull and then X with Skull and X being the 2 Wastewalkers that jump down. Same thing for all the doors. Try to save all your cooldowns and your second potions for the third door. When the first Frozen Warlord drops down, pop lust and just lay into him, and then have a kill order for the next one and then finally the third one. While you are on this door, you should be slowly kiting out into the middle of the area towards the 4th door to avoid the deathtrap of frozen orbs that will accumulate.

Don't try and set a % that you want him to be at, that will only encourage people to tunnel him. If you just make it to the Horridon only phase with 8 or 9 people alive you should have a kill unless your tank gets global'd. Switching targets to the dinomancer is correct, you just have to switch off him once he drops the orb. When he is in his dino form he does nothing and should get cleaved down by your raid.

The worst part of this fight is the third door. War God Jalak is annoying but he doesn't start hurting until the 5-6 roars area, and he should die around that time anyways. On the 4th door (Amani) just make sure that your tanks pick up the bears and face them away since they cleave. Your DPS priority for that door should be Dinomancer to 50%> Shaman that dismounts off bears > Bear (only have one shaman up at a time) > Flame Caster > everything else.

I'd be able to give more help with logs and a group composition, sorry.

It's late and Im tired, so no real log analysis. Your DPS is low and it feels like your DPS is panicking a bit and hitting a bit of everything. The key to adds here is discipline. Take out the elite adds first. Kill the first one before the other two drop down. Don't just AoE, focus fire. To get a bit ahead, burn CDs on the first Wastewalker on gate 1. That should have him dead or close two it when the next 2 drop.

You say "Also, the second and third doors can get pretty hairy when the debuffs stack up, since when we 2-heal our paladin tank and myself are our only two capable of dispelling the diseases, with our moonkin able to help on the poisons as well. "

INTERRUPT. You have less healing pressure if you can interrupt those. This is really a control fight. DPS cannot tunnel on the meters. They need to focus on killing the elite adds, interrupting their casts as needed, moving out of stuff on the ground. Then the non-elite adds. Interrupts are key. Use CDs on elite adds - don't worry about the burn phases. When you get there, blow heroism on Jalak, burn him, then Horridon.

Broccoliform pretty much said all I had on my mind, but I'll add a bit.
Wether Horridon is at 100% or 80% when you reach the last phase hardly makes any difference. That phase is really easy, so put all your focus on getting maximum dps on gate adds.
To me it seems like the dispelling could be a major problem for you. I suggest using 3 healers. That way it is easier for every person who can dispell, to do it every time the dispell is ready.

You really should make dinomancers a priority. The first door isn't so bad I guess, but the second, the guys that use bleeds have a pretty healthy chunk of HP. Having that door open sets you back dps wise. The door adds on the Drakkari door are more fragile, but they're more deadly and more numerous as well with their diseases, which all must be dispelled eventually. I also recommend that you kill the disease adds on that door after the first warlord is dead and tank the remaining two warlords until the door is down and all disease adds are dead. That's how my former guild got our first kill, and if you can keep tanks up it's a good strat for low dps groups.

Otherwise, some general advice: multi-target damage as much as you can (cleaves, multi-dotting, AOE - be ready to react, you can't relaly predict what will work best every time). Interrupt those poison volleys and snuff the venomous effusions out quickly (they have like 800K health on 10). Get those dinomancers down to stop the flow of incoming enemies. One dispel is less mana and time than healing through damage. If you're consistently dying on Drakarri door, try what I said above about prioritizing smaller enemies (that use the diseases) over hte warlord AFTER the first warlord is dead, and pop heroism/bloodlust to down that first warlord.

---------- Post added 2013-05-01 at 07:46 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Mikael123

To me it seems like the dispelling could be a major problem for you. I suggest using 3 healers. That way it is easier for every person who can dispell, to do it every time the dispell is ready.

This is a fight whose difficulty is heavily influenced by dps, like Elegon. My guild just tonight did it and it was trivial because we jsut blew everything up before it could do any real harm, particularly on "stacking" effects like the dispellable debuffs. 3 healing for ease of healing and dispelling may sound great, but the lack of dps will make it so you have more adds up and more dispels, particularly at the Drakkari door where the debuff users come out of the door, unlike the other tribes. I wouldn't suggest 3 healing unless your third healer is much better at healing than they are at dps, most especially because the only thing a healer of any class can dispel that their non-healer counterparts cannot is magic effects on the first door anyway.

Maybe it is too late for me to find the logs much less rummage haha. If you want to make this fight a joke just have your priest respec disc and tunnel Horridon the whole time. If you look in the logs I posted above, I did exactly that and did 120k DPS. With the way that Atonement healing works, plus the fact that it heals units within a 40 yard range of the target, having a disc priest tunnel Horridon will be a net HPS and DPS increase for your group.

Looking briefly over the log for Try 4 (5:30) it seemed like you guys were doing alright until the third door. A lot of deaths to avoidable or mitigateable damage.

Seems like you guys are just taking a lot of damage from the Frozen Orbs and also from the plague. If you kite the boss around, you can hold off on killing the Frozen Warlords in favor of the smaller adds to get the disease stacks under control. Don't bother dispelling someone until they are at 5-6 stacks AND are not a tank. With such limited dispels, you have to make them count.

We were banging our heads on this for quite a while too. What we finally did was marked all the big adds on doors 2-4 beforehand so we knew which we were going after as they landed. We had one melee sit on one of the venomancers on door two while the rest burned down the other and then the dinomancer. We swapped off the dinomancer at 50% each door because after that he just melees the tank, which is kinda what the tank is designed for.
If you can burst down the first one before the second two spawn, that door is cake. As soon as any "fire" patch for each door goes out, you need to move the entire show to the left about 10 yards, with the healers being closer to the next door than the current one so the adds come strolling towards the tank.
You are taking a substantial amount of avoidable damage by not interrupting the venomancers. That puts you in a massive mana hole for later. You have four people who can dispel diseases off of door 3, Paladin, Priest, Priest, Druid(resto with symbiosis on the paladin). With that many, two of which have infinite mana, the diseases should be easily controlled.
Horridon was doing more damage with his easily avoidable Double Swipes than with his Triple Puncture. This is a stand in fire issue. Blazing Sunlight is also doing an incredible amount of damage. This is a dispel issue. You can easily have everyone stack up and get one Mass Dispel off for that one. The major killer is the Venom Bolt Volley. This is a combination interrupt/dispel issue. Have people call out if they get three stacks. But more important is to make sure the venomancers don't cast it to begin with.

Since they are my specialty, your Blood tank is not working his cooldowns to greatest effect and his Blood Plague (and thus tanking debuff) time is absolutely abysmal. He can save Outbreak for the first big add on each door he is on and chain it to the small ones from there, and from them back to the other big ones, and from there to Horridon for his turn. He should also pick up Death Pact, as Conversion is shit. This is one of the fights Death Siphon is actually viable for, however.

Edit: On the gurubashi door, when the venomancers put out their stupid ghost spirit things that eventually cast their same poison shit, when they are all grouped up, have your boomkin toss down a glyphed Solar Beam. They can sit there and stare at the sunlight for 8-10 seconds while you nuke them.

I see you have biggest problems on 2nd and 3rd door. I will try to summarise what others have said and I will also try to add something from myself.

2nd door:Interrupt priest - really its very important. It will reduce the amount of stacks by huge amount. Assign ppl for that it, makes things easier.Dispell from first poison volley - while you have 2-3 ppl dispelling our raid have only me (paladin tank) and we have 2-3 stacks at max. Even if we have some first time raiders and stacks go high (6-7) there should be like only 3-4ppl left to dispell when door closes and you are finishing adds. Configure your ui so it shows who have how many stacks and dispell ppl who have most stacks.DO NOT SWITCH TANK - (yes its caps) let your paladin tank stay on Horridon till 4th door. Reason for that is he only needs to use his active mitigation on tripple puncture and can easy dispell ppl on cd wich will help a lot (remember he must use bubble taunt macro to remove his stacks of tripple puncture).

3rd door:Focus Frozen Warlords - tank should only take care of Frozen Warlords since other adds cannot be tanked for more than couple of seconds anyway and they doesn't hit hard. Ppl should also not run in panic when they have add on them.Stay away from frozen orbs - sounds obvious but we also had problem with that. They must be aware of their surroundings and move. The balls slow you down so you can die very fast if you don't pay attention.

4th door:Kill one bear one rider at a time - so you reduce number of totems. It helps since totems are hardest hitting aoe from adds in this encounter.

Overall tips:
Try to stay on one side of the door behind add tank it helps him to pick up adds.
Dps should help picking up adds that went to horridon tank by dpsing them so add tank can easy pick them up from them.
Stay spread a little - aoe can be avoided much easier and you are still in range of aoe healing.
When War God spawns tank him on one side of Horridon and ppl with charge move to Horridon tank. This way your raid is stacked and don't need to move at all which helps a lot with aoe healing.

This fight is very hectic at some times and can go sloppy downfall very quick. So pay attention and you will be fine. Overall for us it was hardest fight. We had over 100 wipes on it since there is a lot to watch for and some ppl are just not good at multitasking. I wish you luck.

i think the main turning point was positioning and CDs on 3rd door.
3rd door is the hardest part of the fight imo.

have people save their second use of 3min CDs for the first 'big' add of the 3rd door. also, pop hero when he lands, and kill him asap. after that, all dps focus on burning the little aggro-less ones asap. ranged/healers stay between door 3 and 4, with tanks/melee closer to 3. this funnels all the little adds to that side, and through the tank/melee bunch, which makes it easy for them to get cleaved/stunned/slowed. add tank can slowly backpedal towards door 4, to move himself and the melee out of frost orbs.

if you use hero to get past door 3, you won't have it for when war god comes. but you can once again have dps hold 3min CDs for him (not using them on horridon after door 4 with his juicy damage boost debuff) if you have trouble getting him down quickly.

having hybrids dispelling is EXTREMELY valuable to your healers. it saves them a ton of mana and globals. especially if you're 2 healing, which you really should be.

While im sure people already posted about this, but:
On first door we tend to keep our ranged further away from wastewalkers. Seemed like that solved sand trap problem. Interupt the basilisks. Tank everything.
On second door we only tank bloodlords. while priests don't do much damage (relatively). On first priest let one person interrupt. He must die before the second set jumps down. Assign two people to interrupt a specific mob, one on left, one on right. Kill effusion asap, if have any spare interrupters, do interrupt effusions, if not, just kill it. Have your shaman tank dinomancer. If our cat in catform can, your shaman will be bale too.
On third door pop army, make sure its not taunting mobs. All stack and move as group. Tank only frozen warlords, as other have no threat table. Wait until you reach certain stack size, which you are comfortable with, lets say 5. No need to dispel at 1, just to have it reapplied a second later. Blow hero if needed.
On fourth door primarily tank bears and protectors. bears have prio of course. Make sure to kill flame casters. Try to not over nuke bears, so two shamans would not appear at once.
On Horridon, if you used hero already, then you might get in tight spot with tank damage. Try not to have him at 70% or so. Id say 40% when Jallak comes (if he comes on time, rather then %) is the comfy zone, at least for us.
Also make sure there are no odd charges and no odd boss tanking position eg. with its face in the doors or something. To left/right of door, or closer towards middle are the best positions.

Also I might suggest trying individual class forums for help, since that damage looks kinda low. Especially your balance druid: from spell usage it doesn't look like he decided how will he deal with this situation. In druid subforum there is a fix my balance dps thread. I bet people could provide with more usefull info on how to approach that fight and overall improvements. Your hunter also looks low. Think he might go for hunter forums and ask for some inspection there. Rest look more or less ok.
And goodluck with the kill

Flame casters have prio. Bears do nothing except tickle the tank and cleave. Casters have to die immediately.

Think I needed to be more clearer. The tank that tanks protectors and bears, of those two bears have prio. For dps thou its like you said, fire casters prio. Thou I did say to make sure to kill flame casters

First of all, let me just say thank you all for responding. Sorry I've been incommunicado, I posted the topic and then went to bed and just got the chance to catch up.

Anyways, the biggest thing I've gleaned from these posts is that we need to have a dedicated interrupter on the venom priest we aren't killing. Generally we've been having our paladin tank on the adds during that door just to help out with extra interrupts, but it seems like the consensus is that we should have her take the boss on both doors 2 and 3, so she can help out with dispels and we rely on the DPS to handle interrupting the volley. Am I correct in concluding that, even though we'll be losing some DPS on the second venom priest, it's still worth it to assign one of our melee (probably the enhancement shaman) to focus on the unmarked venom priest and consistently interrupt his volleys? We generally finish out the door with anywhere from 3-7 stacks of the poison volley, which is definitely far from ideal.

One other change that I think might help (that I'll be trying out tonight) will be to have myself go moonkin and have the shadow priest (Cleoid) go back to holy (and yes, I know disc is ideal for this fight, but I don't think he's got much experience as disc and I'm hesitant to throw him into a new spec for a progression boss). That might help smooth out the dispels on the second door, since even though we'll still have the same number of poison and disease dispels, they'll be spread across three people rather than two. Is the disc vs. holy difference on this fight significant enough that it would likely be worthwhile to ask him to switch, even though he isn't as experienced with it?

I'll definitely be calling for heroism on the third door when the first warlord jumps down, that should make that door go much more smoothly since we'll (hopefully) get the frozen warlord down fast enough that the DPS has some time to clear out the small adds that are stacking the diseases. As some of you have mentioned, that might make Jalak a bit more difficult, but I don't think we have much choice as it is.

A question that I'm unsure about: some of the responses here make the fourth door sound like the DPS target priority is dino>flame caster>shamans that are out>bears>whatever the other one is, whereas others say dino>shamans>bears>flame casters>other. I know the flame casters have their randomly targeted fireball, is it harmful enough to the raid that it's worthwhile to have the DPS focus on flame casters first? Would it be better to have one DPS spend the entire time running around killing/interrupting flame casters, while the rest focus on bears?

Anyways, we're heading back into the instance tonight to give him some more attempts, so I'll take all your advice in mind and let you know how it goes/log it so I have more than one night of attempts to show. I'll also go ahead and look on the hunter forum for advice as well; the balance druid isn't one of our usual raiders, so until he decides he wants to consistently join the group I'm not as worried about fixing his DPS. Thanks again for all the help everyone.

The most important thing we did on this fight was to figure out positioning at each gate that would funnel the adds (as much as possible) on to the tank. What we liked best was holding the boss to the left, tank and melee center-right, and range-healers loosely grouped back right. That put us in control. Fight felt out of control before that.

Think that the difference about bears and flame casters is that first ones do damage to tank only(positioned properly), while the second ones are raid damage. Bears are fixed meaning you have you will have 3 (haven't seen more and i'm positive that if you get more you are behind on dps, if its even possible), while flame casters come out on every door opening until the door is broken. Not to forget that according to iv (even if its outdated on numbers) bears have 3.6, shamans have 4.2, so 7.8 in total hp, while flame casters have 1.6 so it should be fairly easy not to get overrun by them, plus reducing raid damage. But I guess that with concentrated dps and healers its possible to kill bear/shaman before flame caster.
Also tell your dk to be sure to tank third door and pop army(glyphed to not taunt) when little adds starts pouring. it will reduce diseases you need to dispel.

"That might help smooth out the dispels on the second door, since even though we'll still have the same number of poison and disease dispels,,,"

You're still focusing on dispells. You should factor them into your planning but ideally you interrupt the casts. If you're perfect at interrupting the venom priests you dont have anything to dispell. My point here is that you need to stop assuming that casts will go through and people will need to dispell a lot. The expectation should be that casts are interrupted and dispells are backups for times when interrupts are missed. Pound into your DPS that interrupts are important and that tunneling on mobs or worrying about meters is the wrong approach. DPS will come, but focusing on killing the right mobs and interrupting them when they're casting stuff is KEY. Keep in mind that the DPS should already have the Venom Priest targeted since they're focused on killing them. It's not like they need to target switch to interrupt.

One other change that I think might help (that I'll be trying out tonight) will be to have myself go moonkin and have the shadow priest (Cleoid) go back to holy (and yes, I know disc is ideal for this fight, but I don't think he's got much experience as disc and I'm hesitant to throw him into a new spec for a progression boss). That might help smooth out the dispels on the second door, since even though we'll still have the same number of poison and disease dispels, they'll be spread across three people rather than two. Is the disc vs. holy difference on this fight significant enough that it would likely be worthwhile to ask him to switch, even though he isn't as experienced with it?

1) If someone has two specs that do the same thing, always have them go with the spec they know better.
2) This fight should really be 3 healed until you outgear it. Actually... if your paladin specs into the raid healing glyphs (don't remember names) that could cover one.

Originally Posted by bstbll

I'll definitely be calling for heroism on the third door when the first warlord jumps down, that should make that door go much more smoothly since we'll (hopefully) get the frozen warlord down fast enough that the DPS has some time to clear out the small adds that are stacking the diseases. As some of you have mentioned, that might make Jalak a bit more difficult, but I don't think we have much choice as it is.

I think they meant for War-God Jalak who comes down essentially when a fifth door would come up, but it is also viable to do during third door, especially if you haven't gotten past it consistently yet.

Originally Posted by bstbll

A question that I'm unsure about: some of the responses here make the fourth door sound like the DPS target priority is dino>flame caster>shamans that are out>bears>whatever the other one is, whereas others say dino>shamans>bears>flame casters>other. I know the flame casters have their randomly targeted fireball, is it harmful enough to the raid that it's worthwhile to have the DPS focus on flame casters first? Would it be better to have one DPS spend the entire time running around killing/interrupting flame casters, while the rest focus on bears?

If you are three healing it, the flame casters do not do as much relative damage and can be left to freecast once everyone has to run from the door because of totems. I am on Planet Fatass for that door, and when he charges it I follow him in and pick up and self-nuke the two or three Flamecasters left with BossVengeance(tm).
If you are 2healing the priority is:
Dinomancer(to50%)>Shamans>Flamecasters>Bears(so no shamans should be up if there are any casters)>Dinomancer(below50%)>=Protectors.

Sorry if some of this advice is repeat (I skimmed the previous responses)

1) Pre-mark Venom Priests and have melee or anyone with a short CD interrupt assigned to each one. They stay on that priest until dead (in my group that person doesn't even switch to the dinomancer). Have everyone else kill the Venomous effusions ASAP, and use any free interrupts on them. Doing this you should not get more than 1 maybe 2 casts of Venom Bolt Volley (or 0!). This way the venom dot does insignificant damage and healers won't need to waste much mana to dispel it (I only bother dispelling it on the tanks or anyone that is taking lots of other damage). If it reaches 3 stacks that is when you want to start dispelling it. Druid healer can Symbiose a paladin for an extra dispel (poison/disease).

2) Assign one person with an interrupt (ranged best) to interrupt Dinomancer and everyone (except those interrupting venom priests) to switch to it immediately. Click the orb ASAP.

3) Have the DK tank, tank the adds on the third door. Once the warriors/champions start showing up pop Army. The army will create extra "players" for the adds to focus on and apply diseases. Here again no need to dispel the disease right away. Each time the warrior/champion melees their target they add a stack of disease. Prioritize dispelling those with higher stacks (once around 3-5), if you dispel when lower or the add on them is still at full health they will just keep getting the disease and healers will oom from spamming dispels.

4) On the first 3 doors have the raid stand close to or behind the add tank. This way the adds must run to the tank and into his aoe; therefore, the tank will have an easier time gaining aggro. (4th door though you need to spread but make sure to be spread to the adds still move towards the tank and dont reach the dps/healers first.) Stun, snare, etc any of the smaller adds, to reduce outgoing damage.

5) Tell dps to use damage CDs on the adds. The quicker the adds die the easier the fight will be. Do not save them to use on Horridon. If you have trouble with a door dont feel shy about using heroism to get yourself past it until you feel more comfortable with it.

6) On each door slowly kite the adds towards the next door, this way you leave behind the bad stuff on the ground. Just gotta keep yelling at the ranged to stay near the tank. (of course the 4th door you can't stack but still kite away from the bad stuff).

Much of this fight is about interrupting, dispelling correctly, and add priority. Perfect those and you should have a kill

Its a little hard to tell what the final dps on this fight will be so I peaked at your dps on your Jinrok kill. A couple of your dps are a bit low (hunter, moonkin). Getting your dps to impove as much as they can will help a lot as well!